Heart Attack Symptoms and Women

I rarely create posts that point directly to another post, but I’m making an exception. Every once in a while I come across a post so phenomenally useful that I just have to point it out and share it. Recently Kevin Pho, M.D. of the KevinMD blog (pictured left) posted just that type of post on his blog. The post, written by Carolyn Thomas, shares the first person descriptions of dozens of women who have had heart attacks.

Why is this so useful to my EMT and paramedic readership? Right now, 43% of your female patients who are experiencing heart attacks will present with no chest pain. Chest pain may be the “classic sign” of a heart attack in men, but women are a different story. Female patients are twice as likely to have their heart attacks misdiagnosed by a physician. How many will slip by your assessment skills undiagnosed?

Here’s my suggestion. Check out this post, “Heart Attack Symptoms in Women, In Their Own Words” over at KevinMD.com. Read these excerpts from real female heart attack patients, describing what their heart attack felt like to them. I think you’ll find it a surprising, interesting and informative exercise.

Mastering The Head-To-Toe Assessment

You probably practiced your head-to-toe assessment a bunch in your EMT class. Maybe more than any other skill in the EMT curriculum. If your class was or is anything like mine (as a student or a teacher) you performed the head-to-toe assessment again and again.

As much as we practice this skill in EMT class, I often wonder why so many EMT’s have such bad head-to-toe skills out on the street. It seems that, once we get out on the street, the systematic, thorough head-to-toe assessment falls out of favor and quickly gets replaced with the faster, more direct focused assessment.

That works just fine most of the time. If it didn’t, I figure it probably wouldn’t be such a universal phenomenon. (For the record, have you ever worked somewhere where this wasn’t the case? Neither have I.) The downside is that when the patient arrives who really needs a, honest-to-goodness, rapid, complete head-to-toe, we’re not up to the task.

I happen to believe that patient assessment skills are one of the defining qualities of a talented EMT. Here are seven tips to keep your head-to-toe in top form.

Read This Entire Literary Masterpiece…